Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/298

292 Northup al orthodox theology of the time, as did his friend Clough. Yet Clough found that he could not honestly remain an Anglican; whereas we find no hint that Arnold ever contemplated leaving the church of his fathers.

The explanation would seem to lie in three facts. First, Arnold was intensely attached to the Established Church, whose position as the Via Media never troubled him as it did Newman, and he clung to the belief that it could in some way be made the basis of a new and real church of all England, in which many phases of belief should be represented, and which should be a real society for the cultivation of goodness. Second, he had an utterly exaggerated notion of the benefits of an established church. It was highly desirable, for example, he thought, in America. It never occurred to him that there might be some benefit accruing from the free discussion of moot questions of religion and ecclesiastical polity among different denominations, or that the Dissenters had ever had any excuse for a separate existence. He serenely assumed that whatever treatment the Dissenters had received from the Establishment they doubtless deserved. And this leads us to the point, that Arnold never really understood the Dissenters, and especially that one of the Dissenting bodies to which his religious views in general would have brought him — the Unitarians. His ignorance of the Unitarian position, as shown in the passage in chapter x of "Literature and Dogma," is ludicrous. "The Unitarians are very loud," he says, "about the unreasonableness and unscripturalness of the common doctrine of the Atonement. But in the Socinian Catechism it stands written: 'It is necessary for salvation to know that God is; and to know that God is, is to be firmly persuaded that there exists in reality some One, who has supreme dominion over all things.' Presently afterwards it stands written, that among the testimonies to Christ are 'miracles very great and immense,' miracula admodum magna et immensa." He thus implies that the Unitarians accept the miracles, which he has rejected; yet the Unitarians had long before outgrown this belief.

It is probably due in large measure to Arnold's fearless if often illogical criticism of the Bible that the Anglican Church to-day contains so large a wing of liberal thinkers. For Arnold was a powerful leader of liberal thought within the Establishment.

And this brings us to another question the adequacy of Arnold's basis of knowledge. Professor Sherman himself concedes (p. 313) that for his discussions of the date and authorship of various books of the Scriptures Arnold was "inadequately equipped"; and another recent writer has gone so far as to